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Notice of Rights

All rights reserved, No part of this e-book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN # ISBN: 978-1-928794-02-8

Knowledge Transfer Publishing

8650 Heritage Hill Drive

Elk Grove, CA 95624

916-601-2485

billwittich@comcast.net

www.volunteerpro.net

First Edition

This book is dedicated to all the World-Class Volunteers

I’ve met in my life who continue to inspire me

Introduction

All Community Organizations Are Seeking Volunteers

A Loss of Volunteers

What Do We Mean by Change?

Understanding Generations

Why is Change So Difficult?

10 Issues With the Younger volunteers

Attracting Them To Volunteer

Five Key Innovative Attracting Strategies

How Do We Attract Younger volunteers?

How Can You Change Your Organization?

Volunteer Secrets… Are They’re Any?

Let’s Get Those Baby Boomers!

One Key Attraction Tool is Web 2.0

A Few Closing Thoughts

About the Author

Dr. Bill Wittich is a speaker, consultant, and author in the field of leadership, motivation, and nonprofit management.

For the past twelve years, Bill and his wife Ann have traveled an average of 200 days a year. Their speaking schedule has taken them to all corners of the United States and through much of Europe.

His doctorate is from the University of Southern California where he continues to serve as a mentor to graduate students in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development.

Dr. Wittich has authored eight books in the association and nonprofit field.

They enjoy living in Elk Grove, where they enjoy cooking, collecting antiques, and learning about red wine.

Other Publications

By Dr. Bill Wittich

The Care and Feeding of Volunteers

Model Volunteer Handbook

A Collection of Volunteer Forms

Celebrate Differences

77 Ways to Recruit Volunteers

77 Ways to Recognize Volunteers

Keep Those Volunteer Around

Energize Your Rotary Non-profit

Stop Recruiting / Start Attracting

Introduction

This is a book about volunteering and change. Maybe it is about change and then volunteering. Change is hard for everyone, but very difficult for community non-profit agencies. John Kotter in an article on change in the Harvard Business Review said that 70% of change efforts fail to achieve their desired goal.¹ Wow! Should we bother? My answer is that a non-profit is usually in that other 30 percent that gets things done. Think about food banks or the senior center or clean water programs around the world. We can make change happen. But changes in our volunteer agencies is a a slow movement.

Yes, this book is about Change and Volunteers.

Volunteer leaders have the ability to build a nimble team that is engaged and focused on continually getting better. They can see their organizations grow, expand and build better communities.

Volunteering is a critical change area for all non-profits. When we talk about non-profits we are discussing the typical community non-profit agency as well as those in government and all faith-based agencies. The method of attracting new volunteers to your organization is basically the same regardless of whether you are religious, governmental or community-based. This material applies to national and international volunteer-driven organizations as well. For all of us it is critical to continue to add new volunteers, because every year volunteers leave for a variety of reasons. They move away, they pass away, they lose their interest, and they run out of money, they disagree with the way the organization is going. It does not really matter why they leave, it is important to find new people to replace those who leave. It is another concept to think about all the techniques of retaining our volunteers. It is extremely important to work hard to retain our outstanding volunteers but that is another book. Too many volunteer agencies spend months thinking about how to recruit new volunteers into their organization. It is far more important to learn to attract volunteers into your organization. It is the goal of this book to help you to sense the difference between recruiting and attracting volunteers.

If your non-profit is not attractive to a number of people in your community, you might as well stop recruiting. Attraction must come first. This is a major change for organizations to move from an older view of recruitment to a new area of building attraction for their program.

Wikipedia tells us that attraction means the drawing of one object towards another. In the volunteer world it means drawing one person toward an organization. It is the quality of attracting, the charm that creates an attraction. It is a person or thing that does the attracting. In your case it is the leader or volunteers who attract others to join the team. Or it might be the cause that attracts volunteers to join the organization to do meaningful volunteer work. Think about your attraction to a restaurant in your neighborhood. It might be the food that has attracted you. Or it might be magnetic force of the owner or host at the location that attracts you to return to the restaurant. It might even be a combination of the food, location and people that is attractive to you.

The question we need to deal with in this book is how do we entice guests to visit our organization and not only to come back but to convert them into committed and dedicated volunteers willing to show up on a regular basis.

We will need to decide exactly who we want to attract and why. We know that many agency directors are telling us to be engaging and if we engage our guests will it help them to decide to volunteer. Maybe Seth Godin has it right in his book Tribes² when he says that a tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. Godin says that “Tribes need leadership, they need connection and growth and something new.” They need change. His major theme in the book rings with me. That is “You can’t have a tribe without a leader and you can’t be a leader without a tribe.” Is he talking about our group? I think so. Where is a strong non-profit without a strong leader? And where is a strong leader without a non-profit?

Maybe this book is about change, volunteering and being a strong leader with a tribe.

We’re not asking just anyone to volunteer. We’re looking to attract busy, successful, motivated people who care. The key thought is that we are not looking to recruit warm bodies; we are looking to attract the right people. Attracting the right people means you must put together a program that will help to locate these people. In the corporate world, we call that marketing. In the non-profit world, we call that Public image.

You have to build your marketing first before anyone even knows you exist.

Improving your public image is a tool used to build attraction in your organization. Public image allows people to see what you offer even before they see themselves volunteering in it. Marketing in the past meant putting articles in your local newspaper. Today enhancing your public image might mean using various forms of social media to gain the eyes of those prospective volunteers. Of course, we still continue to market in all those ways that all businesses use to attract attention. That means getting to know the local news media, joining the chamber of commerce, and maybe belonging to local service organizations.

Your audience needs to know that you are in their community. Prospective volunteers either live or work in your community and in either case they need to know that you are there. It is true that you need to invite people to visit your organization, but unless they are aware of all the good things your group does, it will be more difficult. Publicity is an on-going mission as you work to attract prospective volunteers. Very few people volunteer for an organization about which they know nothing. It is difficult at times to attract volunteers for a strong exciting agency, but next to impossible to attract them to an organization with low visibility. Prospects will usually ask others about their decision to join a volunteer group and if their friends have never heard of you it will be tougher to gain new volunteers.

Today many volunteer agencies are not effective in attracting volunteers into its fold. Their numbers of volunteers have not changed over the past years with the exception that they may have lost a few volunteers. You visit the typical agency and you see the mix of middle-aged and older volunteers. They may have added a few volunteers to its roster but not many younger volunteers. This book will explore how non-profits can be successful in growing its volunteer base of all diversity. I think most of us will agree that if your non-profit is to remain a strong community service or faith-based organization then we must continue to add new volunteers.

Your volunteers must include a mix of younger, boomer and mature volunteers. It must include gender and ethnic diversity as well. It is this variety that increases the quality of a non-profit’s volunteers. It is important that your volunteer base mirror the community that the volunteers serve.

Mark Levin in How to Attract and Keep Members in the New Marketplace³ says it so well, “It’s not your father’s (or Mother’s) organization anymore.” He explains that only the organizations that understand the value of adding age diversity will succeed in attracting volunteers of all ages.

This means that non-profits may need to enhance their attraction process. It is critical for all leaders to understand that what brought them into the organization may not be the same thing that will bring this next volunteer in. A few organizations are making changes, but many are not paying attention to these possible changes. Or, even worse, they may be fighting change and trying so hard to maintain the status quo.

It may not even be the idea of change; it may be the speed of this change.

We will discuss change and offer suggestions for helping your volunteer group adjust and understand what it will take to attract new volunteers. We must think about change, not only the changes in your organization, but the changes occurring today in the lives of our volunteers. We must be aware that technology is changing everything. My volunteer meetings are held these days through Go-To-Meeting, where we all connect through our computers.

On-line meetings will save time and allow you to stay off the road. It might allow your busy volunteers more time for work and family. My point is that technology has already changed much about volunteering.

The goal of this book is to help you understand what volunteers expect and how to offer it to them. It is critical to understand your prospective and current volunteer’s views. Understanding where they are coming from will give you an insight that will help you attract them into your group. We will need to see what is going on in their lives, both their personal, family and volunteer lives. By understanding all three parts, it will help us to see how it affects their view of volunteering.

Very few volunteers have an unlimited amount of time available for volunteering. They all will make decisions concerning the most appropriate use of that time that they might use for volunteering. This is why we must be direct and honest concerning the organizations needs for volunteer time. All volunteer work must be meaningful. In no case can we afford to waste volunteer time.

Your non-profit needs to invest in technology and use it to attract new volunteers.

Technology such as websites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter are no longer an option, they are a given. In many cases they are used to save volunteer time. It might be that on-line meetings will save volunteer time. Use of technology will give use more effective communication.

Non-profits must be at the forefront of social media to attract new volunteers, particularly younger volunteers. Just take a look around Starbucks and watch those young professionals interacting with their smart phones, tablets and computers. These tools are their networking lives and non-profits need to fit into this arena. These young professionals, either working away from home or at home have only a limited of time for volunteering. Volunteers come in all ages and the value of all ages brings a fantastic mix of abilities and interests.

But the fresh perspective and out-of-the-box thinking that younger volunteers can bring may open new avenues for your non-profit. Through this, younger volunteers may be able to bring a new network of friends that will be the future for carrying out your mission. While young people can often be counted on to know what is new and hot in the technology world, they can bring more to the table than just being able to set up the LCD projector with ease. Many young people are enthusiastic fundraisers, marketing whizzes, financial geniuses, and special-events gurus. While many of your volunteers may be closer to retirement age, I think they will welcome the younger volunteers with open arms.

While the current excitement is finding young people to bring into your agency, there may well be another group of prospects that we might focus on. Those are that large group of retiring Boomers that could help to increase our volunteer base. These Boomers are retiring at the rate of 10,000 of them each day for the next decade. They are a vital group of healthy, wealthy and wise potential volunteers that we may overlook if we are not aware of them. They are very different from those young prospects in many ways and the attraction process is different for both groups.

You may wonder why I am not focussing on those in-between ages, those prospects between the ages of 40 and 65. I am certainly interested in bringing them on board, but in many cases they are already our volunteers and are leading our non-profits today. The majority of your volunteers, in community, governmental and faith-based programs are in their middle ages. They are a fantastic group of volunteers but remember they are at the prime period in raising families and growing their careers. This may limit the amount of free time they have available to volunteer.

But I do hope that this book will convince you that all generations are needed for your organization to continue its drive to the future. It is just that my focus will be on these two primary areas of focus, the younger ones (teen to mid-30s) and those Baby Boomers (approaching retirement age), and hopefully you will agree with me or at least give me a chance to convince you of the value of your focussing on these two generations.

One thing that both the younger and the Boomer generations have is endless energy

This is energy that they are looking to throw into a cause that they care about, or that will further their professional careers or retirement days. Incorporating both generations into your organization can add a much needed shot of energy and foster new and progressive ideas that can energize your organization. If you expect the best from a young member, you will get it. If you expect that the new Boomer volunteers will give their all, you are right. I believe all leaders are in agreement that we need to attract volunteers into our organization. Let’s get started by thinking about why we are concerned with attracting new volunteers.

¹“Leading Change”